This Explains Everything: Deep, Beautiful, and Elegant Theories of How the World Works

In This Explains Everything, John Brockman, founder and publisher of Edge.org, asked experts in numerous fields and disciplines to come up with their favorite explanations for everyday occurrences. Why do we recognize patterns? Is there such a thing as positive stress? Are we genetically programmed to be in conflict with each other? Those are just some of the 150 questions that the world's best scientific minds answer with elegant simplicity.

Thinking: The New Science of Decision-Making, Problem-Solving, and Prediction

Edited by John Brockman, publisher of Edge.org, Thinking presents original ideas by today's leading psychologists, neuroscientists, and philosophers who are radically expanding our understanding of human thought.

What Should We Be Worried About?: Real Scenarios That Keep Scientists Up at Night

John Brockman, editor of This Will Make You Smarter, presents his latest thought-provoking audiobook, featuring insights from leading thinkers such as Steven Pinker, Lisa Randall, Matt Ridley, and Daniel C. Dennett. Drawing from the horizons of science, today's leading thinkers reveal the hidden threats nobody is talking about - and expose the false fears everyone else is distracted by. Encompassing neuroscience, economics, philosophy, physics, psychology, biology, and more - here are 150 ideas that will revolutionize your understanding of the world.

This Idea Must Die: Scientific Theories That Are Blocking Progress

Each year,John Brockman, publisher of Edge.org, challenges some of the world's greatest scientists, artists, and philosophers to answer a provocative question crucial to our time. In 2014 he asked 175 brilliant minds to ponder: What scientific idea needs to be put aside in order to make room for new ideas to advance? The answers are as surprising as they are illuminating.

What Do You Think About Machines That Think?: Today's Leading Thinkers on the Age of Machine Intelligence

As the world becomes ever more dominated by technology, John Brockman's latest addition to the acclaimed and best-selling Edge Question Series asks more than 175 leading scientists, philosophers, and artists: What do you think about machines that think?

Life: The Leading Edge of Evolutionary Biology, Genetics, Anthropology, and Environmental Science

Scientists' understanding of life is progressing more rapidly than at any point in human history, from the extraordinary decoding of DNA to the controversial emergence of biotechnology. Featuring pioneering biologists, geneticists, physicists, and science writers, Life explains just how far we've come - and takes a brilliantly educated guess at where we're heading.

The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads

In nearly every moment of our waking lives, we face a barrage of advertising enticements, branding efforts, sponsored social media, commercials and other efforts to harvest our attention. Over the last century, few times or spaces have remained uncultivated by the "attention merchants", contributing to the distracted, unfocused tenor of our times. Tim Wu argues that this is not simply the byproduct of recent inventions, but the end result of more than a century's growth and expansion in the industries that feed on human attention.

The Universe: Leading Scientists Explore the Origin, Mysteries, and Future of the Cosmos

In The Universe, today's most influential science writers explain the science behind our evolving understanding of The Universe and everything in it, including the cutting-edge research and discoveries that are shaping our knowledge. Lee Smolin reveals how math and cosmology are helping us create a theory of the whole universe. Neil Turok analyzes the fundamental laws of nature, what came before the big bang, and the possibility of a unified theory. And much more.

Algorithms to Live By: The Computer Science of Human Decisions

All our lives are constrained by limited space and time, limits that give rise to a particular set of problems. What should we do, or leave undone, in a day or a lifetime? How much messiness should we accept? What balance of new activities and familiar favorites is the most fulfilling? These may seem like uniquely human quandaries, but they are not: computers, too, face the same constraints, so computer scientists have been grappling with their version of such problems for decades.

Payoff: The Hidden Logic That Shapes Our Motivations

Every day we work hard to motivate ourselves, the people we live with, the people who work for and do business with us. In this way much of what we do can be defined as being motivators. From the boardroom to the living room, our role as motivators is complex, and the more we try to motivate partners and children, friends and coworkers, the clearer it becomes that the story of motivation is far more intricate and fascinating than we've assumed.

Idrees Haddad says:"Great insights into what motivates and demotivates"

This Is Your Brain on Parasites: How Tiny Creatures Manipulate Our Behavior and Shape Society

A riveting investigation of the myriad ways that parasites control how other creatures - including humans - think, feel, and act. These tiny organisms can live only inside another animal, and, as McAuliffe reveals, they have many evolutionary motives for manipulating their host's behavior. Far more often than appreciated, these puppeteers orchestrate the interplay between predator and prey.

What do Disney, Bollywood, and "the Batkid" teach us about how to create celebrity experiences for our audiences? How can a vending machine inspire world peace? Can being "imperfect" make your business more marketable? Can a selfie improve one's confidence? When can addiction be a good thing?

Ethics in the Real World: 82 Brief Essays on Things That Matter

Peter Singer is often described as the world's most influential philosopher. He is also one of its most controversial. The author of important books such as Animal Liberation and Practical Ethics, he helped launch the animal rights and effective altruism movements and contributed to the development of bioethics. Now, in Ethics in the Real World, Singer shows that he is also a master at dissecting important current events in a few hundred words.

The Daily Stoic: 366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance, and the Art of Living

Why have history's greatest minds - from George Washington to Frederick the Great to Ralph Waldo Emerson along with today's top performers, from Super Bowl-winning football coaches to CEOs and celebrities - embraced the wisdom of the ancient Stoics? Because they realize that the most valuable wisdom is timeless and that philosophy is for living a better life, not a classroom exercise. The Daily Stoic offers a daily devotional of Stoic insights and exercises, featuring all-new translations.

The Art of Thinking Clearly

A novelist, thinker, and entrepreneur, Rolf Dobelli deftly shows that in order to lead happier, more prosperous lives, we don't need extra cunning, new ideas, shiny gadgets, or more frantic hyperactivity - all we need is less irrationality. Simple, clear, and always surprising, this indispensable audiobook will change the way you think and transform your decision making - at work, at home, every day.

You Have the Right to Remain Innocent

Law professor James J. Duane became a viral sensation thanks to a 2008 lecture outlining the reasons why you should never agree to answer questions from the police - especially if you are innocent and wish to stay out of trouble with the law. In this timely, relevant, and pragmatic new book, he expands on that presentation, offering a vigorous defense of every citizen's constitutionally protected right to avoid self-incrimination.

Pre-Suasion: Channeling Attention for Change

The author of the legendary best seller Influence, social psychologist Robert Cialdini, shines a light on effective persuasion and reveals that the secret doesn't lie in the message itself but in the key moment before that message is delivered.

Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise

Have you ever wanted to learn a language or pick up an instrument, only to become too daunted by the task at hand? Expert performance guru Anders Ericsson has made a career of studying chess champions, violin virtuosos, star athletes, and memory mavens. Peak condenses three decades of original research to introduce an incredibly powerful approach to learning that is fundamentally different from the way people traditionally think about acquiring a skill.

Ego Is the Enemy

"While the history books are filled with tales of obsessive visionary geniuses who remade the world in their images with sheer, almost irrational force, I've found that history is also made by individuals who fought their egos at every turn, who eschewed the spotlight, and who put their higher goals above their desire for recognition." (From the prologue)

Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error

To err is human. Yet most of us go through life assuming (and sometimes insisting) that we are right about nearly everything, from the origins of the universe to how to load the dishwasher. If being wrong is so natural, why are we all so bad at imagining that our beliefs could be mistaken, and why do we react to our errors with surprise, denial, defensiveness, and shame?

The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future

Much of what will happen in the next 30 years is inevitable, driven by technological trends that are already in motion. In this fascinating, provocative new book, Kevin Kelly provides an optimistic road map for the future, showing how the coming changes in our lives - from virtual reality in the home to an on-demand economy to artificial intelligence embedded in everything we manufacture - can be understood as the result of a few long-term accelerating forces.

The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself

Already internationally acclaimed for his elegant, lucid writing on the most challenging notions in modern physics, Sean Carroll is emerging as one of the greatest humanist thinkers of his generation as he brings his extraordinary intellect to bear not only on the Higgs boson and extra dimensions but now also on our deepest personal questions. Where are we? Who are we? Are our emotions, our beliefs, and our hopes and dreams ultimately meaningless out there in the void?

A Field Guide to Lies: Critical Thinking in the Information Age

We are bombarded with more information each day than our brains can process - especially in election season. It's raining bad data, half truths, and even outright lies. New York Times best-selling author Daniel J. Levitin shows how to recognize misleading announcements, statistics, graphs, and written reports, revealing the ways lying weasels can use them.

Publisher's Summary

What scientific concept would improve everybody's cognitive toolkit? This is the question John Brockman, publisher of Edge.org, posed to the world's most influential thinkers. Their visionary answers flow from the frontiers of psychology, philosophy, economics, physics, sociology, and more. Surprising and enlightening, these insights will revolutionize the way you think about yourself and the world.

This Will Make You Smarter features Daniel Kahneman on the “focusing illusion”; Jonah Lehrer on controlling attention; Richard Dawkins on experimentation; Aubrey De Grey on conquering our fear of the unknown; Martin Seligman on the ingredients of well-being; Nicholas Carr on managing “cognitive load”; Steven Pinker on win-win negotiating; Daniel C. Dennett on benefiting from cycles; Jaron Lanier on resisting delusion; Frank Wilczek on the brain's hidden layers; Clay Shirky on the “80/20 rule”; Daniel Goleman on understanding our connection to the natural world; V. S. Ramachandran on paradigm shifts; Matt Ridley on tapping collective intelligence; John McWhorter on path dependence; Lisa Randall on effective theorizing; Brian Eno on “ecological vision”; Richard Thaler on rooting out false concepts; J. Craig Venter on the multiple possible origins of life; Helen Fisher on temperament; Sam Harris on the flow of thought; and Lawrence Krauss on living with uncertainty.

I'm finding this series habit-forming. I like the quickness of each little vignette: it introduces an idea or new phrasing or view of things that may be novel to me (great!) or not (fine, it's not too long). From time to time one hears a very gifted explainer: it introduces me to authors whose full-length books I also read.

Where does This Will Make You Smarter rank among all the audiobooks you’ve listened to so far?

This has to be pretty close to, if not at the top.

Who was your favorite character and why?

I found the section on collective intelligence to be the most interesting.

Any additional comments?

The title really does deliver, but beware, there is a lot of hugely differing ideas in this book that moves very quickly. Take your time reading and processing this, and maybe give it 2 reads. Well worth it.

Would you try another book from John Brockman and/or John Allen Nelson and Khristine Hvam ?

Maybe

What could John Brockman have done to make this a more enjoyable book for you?

The whole idea of "what will improve your cognitive toolbox" sounds like a good one but the pieces themselves are disjointed and wander around from topic to topic with no apparent connection. After a while it degrades into just another "this is what the future will bring" piece of fluff.

What about John Allen Nelson and Khristine Hvam ’s performance did you like?

I would not recommend this book. I thought it had an interesting idea, but after listening to the content it was a bit bland. It wasn't anything new that I could use as within an educational standpoint.

Would you try another book from John Brockman and/or John Allen Nelson and Khristine Hvam ?

unlikely

What could John Brockman have done to make this a more enjoyable book for you?

be more broad and not be stuck with the idea that science is know-all

What reaction did this book spark in you? Anger, sadness, disappointment?

The sadness that steams from the idea that a limited man-made science with limited vocabulary is capable of answering the limitless.the intellectual arrogance of the scientists quoted in the book was so narrow minded and out of touch with reality that makes the book monotonically unreadable. The ideas discussed are only related to small and insignificant species (humans) whom trying desperately make sense of things so to compartmentalize them and to make sense of the only in that fashion.

Would you try another book from John Brockman and/or John Allen Nelson and Khristine Hvam ?

unlikely

What could John Brockman have done to make this a more enjoyable book for you?

be more broad and not be stuck with the idea that science is know-all

What reaction did this book spark in you? Anger, sadness, disappointment?

The sadness that steams from the idea that a limited man-made science with limited vocabulary is capable of answering the limitless.the intellectual arrogance of the scientists quoted in the book was so narrow minded and out of touch with reality that makes the book monotonically unreadable. The ideas discussed are only related to small and insignificant species (humans) whom trying desperately make sense of things so to compartmentalize them and to make sense of the only in that fashion.